“I heard something,” Mrs. Wells remembered. “It sounded like someone screaming for help, but I was taking a little nap at the time and thought I had dreamt it. Dear me! Isn’t it dreadful?”
Geraldine watched the mother, whose placid face showed no hint of her intimate and personal connection with the recital now going on about her in several keys.
A shrill-voiced man scoffed at the theory of a “man overboard.” It was the usual false alarm on board a ship. Passengers have nothing to do, and therefore they’re always glad to get themselves all fussed up; they’d scream “Man overboard” if they saw a flying fish.
Another person felt differently about the matter. And he knew what he was talking about. He had his information on the best authority. There was a man really overboard—the second-officer was the authority—a man overboard while the steamer was stoking ahead at twenty knots an hour. And did they stop to hunt for him? No. What would be the use? He’d be a mile astern before we could turn about.
While Mrs. Wells from her throne among the pillows cross-examined the men—a favourite rôle of hers and a sign that she was coming back to her control of things—Geraldine had dropped back into her chair, seized by a horrid suggestion of nausea. Every vivid detail of the struggle was made more vivid by the heartless narrators. There had been much interruption as the men rehearsed various versions and, worse, a lot of the senseless witticisms that men employ to show that they are a devil-may-care lot.
Mrs. Wells scoffed at the notion that a man, a passenger possibly, had really fallen overboard and that the vessel had gone on its way without any concern in the matter. Had the second-officer himself told the gentleman? Well, no; not the second-officer himself; but he had told the thing in confidence to the quartermaster, who had passed it along to the crew. It was the bathroom steward, in fact, who had given out the details.
“Ah!” Mrs. Wells was highly pleased with her quiz. “On the authority of the bathroom steward!” she chuckled. “You men know what the day’s run is going to be, on the authority of the bathroom steward; you tell us exactly when we shall dock, on the authority of the bathroom steward. The male bathroom steward, my dear sir, is the exact equivalent of the female hairdresser.”
A quiet Englishman came into the group while Mrs. Wells was expressing her suspicion of the theory of “man overboard.” As others emerged from the companion-way, which led up directly from the dining-room, they stopped to listen. About six or eight passengers lounged in chairs or stood about. From her enthroned position under the bridge Mrs. Wells was naturally the centre of the group.
“But, really, there was no man overboard, you know,” the Englishman told Mrs. Wells. “I saw the whole thing and helped to get the poor chap on his feet. He wasn’t overboard, but he was jolly well close to it.”
Questions overflowed on the reticent Englishman.